Husband and I have decided to take advantage of the not-to-be-believed low mortgage interest rates, and are refinancing our home. We’re basically taking 15 years off the mortgage at an increase in our monthly payment of about $45. That must be a good deal.

We are going with a local bank/banker that was recommended by one of my piano student’s parents, who works in finance, so we figured he would know a good bank/banker to work with. Unfortunately this is a bank with which I have previous experience; the type of experience which caused me to close all of my accounts with them ~ 15 years ago and never look back.

But they are offering the best rate at the lowest closing costs, so what can you do?

Part of the deal, though, is that we have to open an account with their bank to have our payments automatically deducted. As we have other bills that are automatically paid from our current accounts, I speculated, (correctly, as we found out later), that this was so that we would decide having accounts at two banks was too much of a hassle and we would just move all of our accounts to their bank. As the bank officer told us, we only need to have that account open for 12 months, because they figure, if we haven’t switched our accounts by then, we won’t. Strangely, he did not reply to my inquiry as to whether it would make any difference at all if I just told them that now.

I call this coercion.

But, they are offering the best rate at the lowest closing costs, so what can you do?

To make the whole thing even more fun, we have been getting repeated phone calls from their customer service department(s) asking us to rate our banking experience. Including a call after I went into one of their branch offices to deposit the $100 required to open the account. I think I was in the building for 3 minutes. I walked up to the counter, handed the probably-overqualified-and-underpaid teller my check and deposit slip, received my receipt, selected a cherry lollipop out of the festively decorated red pail, and made my departure. At 9:00 p.m. that night some poor probably-overqualified-and-underpaid schmuck calls to ask about our banking experience.